Course overview
Leading Enhanced Provision will give you insights, time and a supportive community to think deeply about what an effective enhanced provision could look like in your school. You’ll explore how enhanced provision fits within whole-school inclusion and how offering effective support alongside the mainstream curriculum could help your pupils with complex needs.
- Length: 12 months.
- Delivery: In-person conference, followed by online content and virtual sessions.
- Cost: £1,200 +VAT per participant.
- Support: Facilitated learning and peer collaboration.
What is enhanced provision?
Enhanced provision in mainstream schools is used to provide a targeted, enhanced offer for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities. This may involve creating a separate dedicated space, repurposing existing space or making flexible use of spaces throughout the school. Enhanced provision involves a pupil being meaningfully integrated into the school’s mainstream offer. It may be called:
- Resource provision (RP)
- Specialist resource provision (SRP)
- Alternative resource provision (ARP)
- Resource bases
- Specialist inclusion bases
- SEN or SEND units
These provisions can be an impactful way to meet the needs of pupils who have barriers to their learning. However, despite their high potential for positive impact, expert guidance for developing effective enhanced provision is scarce. And, if poorly implemented, enhanced provisions can further disadvantage some of our most vulnerable pupils. That’s why leaders tell us they benefit from guided support to think carefully about whether this approach is right for their setting and what promising practice looks like.
The programme is designed to support leaders who are leading inclusion bases for pupils with complex SEND. Importantly, the programme does not focus on how to lead inclusion bases focused on support with behaviour, sometimes known as internal enhanced provision or internal alternative provision.
Why this programme?
This 12-month programme draws upon the latest resources and sector expertise, using findings from our work with community leaders over the last year to develop your understanding and approaches. Using emerging ideas of best practice and the latest available resources, the programme will support you to make the right decisions for your pupils.
Through a blend of facilitated live sessions, peer collaboration groups and self-guided online learning, you will develop the skills for overseeing and improving an effective enhanced provision or inclusion base.
What you’ll learn
This programme guides you through a process of reflection, learning and planning, where you'll study leading research and draw upon models of emerging best practice from across the sector. The process will be explorative and collaborative, leading you to the cutting edge of a domain where fresh understanding is frequently being uncovered and ideas of best practice are still being shaped.
With your base of understanding, you'll be supported to contextualise new learning to suit the specific needs of your own setting.
Your learning modules will explore:
- Purpose and pupil outcomes: how can you work enhanced provision into your SEND strategy and set goals for its impact?
- Culture and enabling conditions: how can you model inclusive leadership, establishing a culture where enhanced provision can make a strong positive impact?
- Considering the learning environment: how can you design an intentional environment for enhanced provision, both in separate designated spaces and mainstream ones, to best support pupil outcomes?
- Using your workforce: how can you deploy qualified teachers and teaching assistants effectively, engage your wider staff team and provide targeted professional development to support your enhanced provision goals?
How you’ll learn
You'll learn through a blend of in-person and virtual deliveries, as well as through self-guided study using an online learning platform.
You’ll take part in:
- An in-person conference day: gather with your peers to start the programme with a day of learning, establishing the foundational understanding you need.
- Five facilitated ‘twilights’: learn from our expert facilitators in an online, 60-minute session with a group of peers. You’ll be introduced to new approaches and ideas, with space to discuss and consider how you will apply them.
- Six sense-making ‘twilights’ (one per half term): attend these 60-minute, facilitated online sessions with a small group of peers. You’ll discuss your recent learning, with an emphasis on adapting it to your school’s context and collaborative problem solving.
- Two facilitated calls: join these calls to receive guidance on collaborative problem solving, then put it into action, working through a range of topical challenges with a peer.
- Digital school visits: bring theory to life by seeing how teachers and leaders are implementing an inclusive culture and enhanced provision within their setting.
- Wider reading and connection between sessions: engage with key research and ideas of emerging best practice to keep improving your understanding. Utilise the network of peers you have joined to maximise what you've learned from the programme.